Labour accused of 'scandalous attempt to subvert democracy' - "Four mayoral elections due to take place in May 2026 are set to be postponed by two years, Sky News understands. Elections for the new mayoralties of Essex, Hampshire and the Solent, Sussex and Brighton, and Norfolk and Suffolk will be pushed back until 2028... This is the second time elections are being delayed in these areas... The news has sparked accusations Labour are delaying the elections for political purposes. Reform UK's head of policy Zia Yusuf said: "This is a blatant attempt to stop big Reform wins next May. "It's an act of a desperate government who are clinging onto power by any means necessary. "Labour has proven time and time again that they're not beyond denying democracy to millions of people in order to maintain their cosy status quo."... The Liberal Democrats' local government spokesperson Zoe Franklin called the postponed elections "a disgrace"."
James Price on X - "Even for a Guardian column, this is an absurd spectacle. The brother of the man pushing the giveaway of the Chagos Islands, knighted for services to Tony Blair, saying that it’s Reform who are the threat to free elections and a free society. Not his beloved Labour Party which is scrapping jury trials, one of our most ancient liberties, or who are literally cancelling elections they know they will lose this May. Then it’s the usual smorgasbord of leftist platitudes: he accuses parties around the world of rigging elections, cites ‘the populist playbook’, betrays himself as being so America-brained that he can’t help but cite Democrats, including Stacey Abrams who refused to concede an election she lost and who has been mired in campaign finance scandals. And his other great solution? More and better TikTok videos. It’s honestly absurd that these great Labour minds have the intellectual depth of a Jaegerbomb but feel confident to spout these platitudes as if they are great maestros."
Happy new year — same unhappy old Keir Starmer - "Voter perceptions of the prime minister have curdled so badly that he begins 2026 with some of the worst personal approval scores on record. This has shifted the fevered speculation about his future from whether he can take Labour into the next election to how long it will be before he is forced aside. Sharon Graham, the leader of Unite, this week issued a warning in The Times to Labour backbenchers who might be tempted to think swapping Starmer for someone else could be a quick fix. The union boss is clear she thinks Starmer is toast. But her cheerless new year message is that it will take different policies, not just a different leader, to address Labour’s woes. Despite being Labour’s biggest union donor, Graham is no friend of the government. Elected in 2021 on a left-wing platform to replace the hardly moderate Len McCluskey, she has never refrained from criticising the government. Her prescription is that Labour should levy more taxes on the wealthy to spend more and invest in infrastructure, and clamp down on corporate profits: elements of a classically left agenda. She may control the purse strings but union leaders elected on low turnouts by declining memberships can hardly claim to represent the country’s workers. Yet Graham has put her finger on something fundamental. Starmer is a disastrously bad prime minister: not just because he is a terrible and inauthentic communicator but because there is no agenda to his government. He very clearly lacks any analysis of what has been going wrong in the UK and what he is going to do to address it. This was manifestly obvious from Labour’s 2024 election campaign. We live in the age of politicians offering quick-fix solutions to structural economic challenges, such as two decades of stagnating living standards, only to end up exposed when their solutions don’t work. First came the Tories with Brexit; then we got the ultimate centrist-dad pitch from Labour: vote for us because our competence will magically turn around Britain’s growth problems, generating the tax revenue we need to fix everything else and eliminating any painful trade-offs. It was only good enough to land Labour a victory because voters had had enough of the Conservatives. Unsurprisingly, the strategy has been no more effective than Brexit. And it has left Labour’s lack of a plan horribly exposed. Eighteen months after a general election, when voters do not sense things starting to get better, “we are the grown-ups who are good at this” starts to sound like a pitch ludicrously out of touch with reality. All that is left is a justifiable sense among voters that they have been duped yet again by a government generating communications debacle after communications debacle. Rachel Reeves’s budget was a political disaster because there was no governing philosophy driving it. Graham’s “rudderless” verdict starts to appear kind... A new prime minister would only be successful if they could articulate and deliver a coherent policy agenda for the country. Without that, the general funk associated with Starmer’s Labour would quickly envelop any politician, even one as charismatic as Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham or Angela Rayner. But there are several reasons why this will be tricky. It is harder to do this kind of long-term thinking in government than in opposition. A party holding a leadership contest in which candidates propose competing visions for the country while it is in government tends to look self-indulgent. There is the added complication that it is party members, not MPs, who get the ultimate say over who would be the next prime minister, and they sit well to the left of the median voter. Leadership contenders this time around won’t have the luxury Starmer had and squandered back in 2020 of four long years passing between his pitch to members and pitch to voters, giving him precious time to work out a plan. None of this is conducive to Labour being able to escape its Starmerite pall. The most likely outcome appears to be a superficial leadership contest between politicians ostensibly from different wings of the party, with slightly contrasting glosses on their campaigns, but who would not actually end up leading the country very differently from Starmer. If that happens, the best Labour could hope for is to scrape some sort of victory in 2029 to secure another five years of government in which they achieve less than they did this time round, before handing over the reins of power to someone else. This is the Starmer paradox. He will go down as the man who won a stonking landslide but who did not know what to do with it. The election victory he secured is completely eclipsed by the lack of thinking he did in opposition about Labour’s plan for government. There is a small chance a new leader could turn that around but all the institutional incentives in the party are set against it. The defining characteristic of Starmerism is its vacuousness and it is going to take the party a lot more than a leadership election to shed this aspect of his legacy."
Starmer is at war with British democracy - "It is, again, surely more than coincidental that those areas where delays are deemed necessary are those where a party threatening the Government is riding high in the polls. To have delayed scheduled elections on the grounds that a rival is likely to win would be outrageous behaviour utterly at odds with the fundamental principles of democracy. And it is extraordinary that we cannot say, with any degree of confidence, that it is not in fact government policy. After all, it would be in keeping with the assault on democracy being conducted by the Government with Sir Keir’s apparent approval. Justice Secretary David Lammy is attempting to push through the abolition of jury trials for all but the most serious offences, in the process ensuring that controversial free-speech issues will tend to be heard by judges who can be relied upon to adhere to the ruling ideology. The House of Lords, which is likely to object strenuously to these changes, is scheduled for “reforms” which seem likely to strengthen the Government’s hand in the upper chamber. Then, of course, there is the proposed roll-out of facial recognition technology linked to the passport database across the nation, the campaign to tie people to a central government digital ID, and the provisions of the online safety act which all but mandate verification of identity for anyone who wishes to seriously engage with political discourse. The principle that governments should avoid measures which autocratic regimes would dearly love to have in place remains a good one. Facial recognition technology on its own would give the state the power to track people about their business to an alarming degree; the use of digital IDs – quite possibly linked to bank, tax and employment records – would result in a full picture of daily lives. The British Government already has access to a formidable array of surveillance technologies under defined conditions. Allowing this to expand in unguarded fashion risks a repeat of previous scandals in which individual privacy is stripped away without adequate safeguards. It was only relatively recently that the Government lost a case in front of the European Court of Human Rights over GCHQ’s mass interception of communications. It is not beyond imagination that the introduction of these systems could result in individual level tracking which would similarly be open to abuse. Nor is it particularly hard to see how this could give the state levers with which to shut down dissent, or put pressure on critics of controversial policies. The potential for such misuse to further degrade Britain’s democracy is all too clear."
Labour plans to delay local elections illegitimate, says Electoral Commission - "Labour’s proposal to delay local elections is illegitimate, the head of the Electoral Commission has said. Vijay Rangarajan, the commission’s chief executive, said it did not think the Government’s justification was a “legitimate reason” for postponing ballots in 63 areas. The Government has been accused of trying to subvert democracy after announcing that ministers were considering delaying elections as part of sweeping plans to reorganise local government.
Out-of-touch voters must stop letting our poor Government down - "After East Germany’s communist regime found itself having to repel an uprising by more than a million citizens in 1953, the great German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote a short satirical poem, entitled Die Lösung – or, in English, The Solution. Supporters of the regime, it noted dryly, believed that “the people” had “squandered the confidence of the government”. In which case, the poem concluded, would it not make sense “for the government/ To dissolve the people/ And elect another?” It was hard to avoid recalling those immortal words while reading an article this week in the Financial Times, in which pollsters and other expert observers were asked how on earth our own Government has become so unprecedentedly despised. Indeed, Ipsos says that Sir Keir Starmer is now the most unpopular prime minister in the entire history of polling. According to one Labour ally, however, it’s really quite straightforward. The problem actually lies with the voters themselves. “The idea that Keir Starmer is worse than Boris Johnson or Liz Truss is nuts,” complained Tom Baldwin, who is a former Labour adviser, as well as Sir Keir’s biographer. “Something is going on with the electorate.” I don’t know whether Sir Keir himself shares this Brechtian analysis. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he did. It would certainly explain a lot. For example, it would explain why his Government is postponing so many local elections. Sir Keir is simply giving the electorate time to see the error of its ways. Voters will be permitted to vote again only when they’ve demonstrated that they are fit to do so. It would also explain why Sir Keir is granting the vote to 16-year-olds. Since adult voters have proven to be such a disappointment to him, he’s going to give children a go, to see whether they can do any better."
Reform won most council by-elections in 2025
Farage vows to restore law and order to London - "“In London, [crime] is the dominant issue. If you go to the outer doughnut, 80 per cent of police stations have closed since 2010 and there is a sense that the police are invisible in every way. “In inner London and spreading to the suburbs are issues like knife crime.” Crimes including phone thefts have surged in London,while a study by the capital city’s first independent victims’ commissioner found that just 40 per cent of crime was reported."
Ben Leo on X - "NEW: Starmer green-lights digital ID using illegal migrants as excuse First of all, you’re asking illegals to be honest and give correct information. Total charade. More importantly, they can stop the boats without digital ID. Trump did, overnight. Ask yourself why they don’t?"
Meme - "DIGITAL ID IS FOR YOUR SAFETY. NOTHING TO HIDE, NOTHING TO FEAR"
"STOP & SEARCH THE USUAL SUSPECTS. NOTHING TO HIDE, NOTHING TO FEAR"
Basil the Great on X - "10 Days ago Keir Starmer said Digital I.D was to stop illegal migrants. Now they openly say it will be used for:
Applying for Jobs
Your School Records
Paying for daycare
Collect your payslips
Birth Certificates
Claim Benefits
Apply for Nursery
Hackers will know everything"
Politics news: Britons sign petition demanding Digital ID referendum as fury grows at Keir Starmer’s push for ‘state control’ - "Polling suggests the British public would likely vote against Digital ID if a referendum was held today. More in Common found that 45 per cent of Britons oppose Digital ID, with just 32 per cent voicing support for the plan."
Vigne Kozacek on X - "Facts don't lie: Italy's mandatory ID cards haven't stopped the flood—67,000 small boat arrivals in 2024 alone. Meanwhile, the UK without them? Just 37,000. Digital IDs are a Trojan horse for surveillance, not security. Don't let them fool you into surrendering your freedoms. #StopTheBoats #NoDigitalID #Together"
Wide Awake Media on X - "Tony Blair on the incredible "benefits" of combining digital ID with facial recognition and AI. 😳 "Facial recognition can now spot suspects in real time from live video... [It] helps identify suspects quickly in busy places like train stations and events." "AI will go even further—spotting crime patterns, guiding patrols and streamlining decisions... This is where technology, like digital ID, becomes critical." "We can ensure that digital ID enhances rather than threatens personal privacy. The key is building trust and designing... systems that are... effective at combatting crime and making us all safer.""
Count Dankula on X - "The funniest thing about all of this is if you are the victim of a crime and you call the police, or even if you put the work in and track down the criminal yourself and call the police like "hey I found the guy I'm literally outside his house and I can literally see my stolen property through his window", the police STILL won't show up. Even when cops have a positive ID, CCTV footage, the guys name, address, everything, they don't show up. So trying to push the whole "this will help us identify suspects faster" bullshit doesn't wash when you already don't do anything after you identify suspects. We know what this is really for, and I wish Tony Blair, the phantom of the opera of British politics that he is, would just fuck off."
Newborn babies could be given Digital ID in 'deeply sinister' expansion of controversial Labour policy discussed in secret by ministers
Clearly, there's a huge problem with illegal immigrants pretending to be babies to work
Government drops plans for mandatory digital ID to work in UK
Joe Rich on X - "BREAKING: Labour Councillor Michael Situ, Southwark’s Cabinet Member for Housing who decided not to take any action against Rachel Reeves, has himself been forced to resign after being caught committing the same landlord licence ‘blunder’ (via @Telegraph)"
Moving Home with Charlie on X - "No. I don’t believe it. It’s a wind up. What?? The Councillor who let Reeves off for being an unlicensed landlord was, himself, an unlicensed landlord and has had to resign his position. Someone please make it stop!"
White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now - The Atlantic - "The share of the typical white-collar workday spent in meetings has steadily increased for the past few decades, and it continues to grow by the year... In 2016, a small group of work researchers calculated that time spent in meetings had increased by 50 percent since the 1990s. “Collaboration is taking over the workplace,” they wrote in an article in Harvard Business Review. “Buried under an avalanche of requests for input or advice," some workers were spending so much time in meetings, taking calls, and combing through their inbox that their most “critical work” often had to wait until they were home. Wall-to-wall meetings from 9 to 5 were pushing any creative or individual work to some period after dinner. In 2022, Microsoft researchers published a study that anonymously tracked workers using the company’s software. They discovered that, in fact, a miniature workday was forming in the late evening. About one-third of the workers in their survey were as likely to work at 10 p.m. as they were at 8 a.m. The reason? When the pandemic sent knowledge workers home, official meetings replaced casual interactions and made it impossible for many people to get things done unless they found time to log back online after dinner. In further research, Microsoft has found that, since 2020, workers in their sample have tripled the time they spent in meetings. “I think we’ve hit the high point of max human inefficiency in white-collar work,” Jared Spataro, a vice president at Microsoft who focuses on artificial intelligence and work trends, told me. “It sometimes seems as if the modern worker spends more time talking about work than actually working.” If someone had to defend this meeting-industrial complex, they might point out that as an economy gets bigger and more complicated, it depends on bigger and more complicated organizations. As firms grow, they accumulate bureaucratic habits. Departments are born, and workers within those departments develop expertise and lingo that is alien to people just down the hall. Working across these divisions requires that people spend more time getting up to speed on what their colleagues are doing... recent cultural changes might be driving the surge in meeting times. “In the last few years, the business world has focused much more on inclusion and on letting more people’s voices be heard in decision-making,” he said. Inclusion can be a virtue, Spataro emphasized. But it can also be a cost. A business culture that allows more people to “say their piece” is, automatically, one that requires people to spend more time listening to other people talk. In some decisions, that might be appropriate. At extremes, an office that requests more input is an office where talking about work can intrude on efficient decision making... Perhaps the most common critique is that many meetings are theatrical presentations of information best conveyed in an email. The typical meeting is a leaky time suck, absorbing people’s attention in a way that cannot be fully measured by simply counting up the total number of hours blocked out for calls. On the front end, getting a hold of co-workers in an age of hybrid work—their location, their time zone, their schedule and availability, their preference for phone or Zoom or Teams or Skype—imposes a huge invisible “coordination tax,” even if the work never appears on somebody’s calendar. On the back end, every interruption to the workday leaves behind a wake of dead time. When you have to stop individual work—whether it’s writing a document, putting together a PowerPoint, or working in Excel—you experience switching costs as you move away from that activity to go into a meeting. Gloria Mark of UC Irvine has found that workers require an average of 25 minutes to return to their original task after an interruption. By this measure, a 30-minute meeting is, for the typical worker, best thought of as a one-hour detour. Altogether, the meeting-industrial complex has grown to the point that communications has eclipsed creativity as the central skill of modern work. Last year, another Microsoft survey found that the typical worker using its software spent 57 percent of their time “communicating”—that is, in meetings, email, and chat—versus 43 percent of their time “creating” documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and the like. Today, knowledge work is, quantitatively speaking, less about creating new things than it is about talking about those things."
JayGen 𝕏 er🇨🇦 on X - "Canada Is Becoming a Nation Run by Criminals — For Criminals
There comes a moment when government waste stops looking like incompetence and begins to resemble treason. Canada has long passed that moment. What we are watching now is the systemic looting of a nation by the people sworn to serve it. Billions disappear with no oversight, no consequences, and not even the pretence of responsibility. From the WE Charity scandal, to the SNC-Lavalin affair, to the $50-billion Canada Infrastructure Bank that produced nothing, the pattern is unmistakable: Money flows out, friends benefit, nothing gets built, and nobody answers for any of it. And it’s only getting worse. Stellantis received the largest subsidy in Canadian history — and the minister who approved it didn’t even read the contract. Honda and Volkswagen secured major subsidies with broken oversight. Northvolt collapsed after being showered with taxpayer money. A new LNG megaproject — celebrated in Ottawa — will mostly create jobs in Korea and Japan while American firms profit. ArriveCan, a $54 million app that should have cost $80,000, funnelled money to a firm that admitted it didn’t even build the thing. And now Algoma Steel, fresh off a $500 million government package, is laying off a thousand workers. Former Saskatchewan public servant Joe Carson once found that about 40 percent of every tax dollar is wasted. Add corruption, political favours, and vote-buying, and the number approaches 70 or 80 percent. At that point, you don’t have a government. You have a cartel with a flag."
Why Did New Zealand Turn on Jacinda Ardern? | The New Yorker - "In 2022, Jacinda Ardern, the then Prime Minister of New Zealand, was approached by a stranger in an airport bathroom. Ardern was alone, washing her hands, when a middle-aged woman walked up to her at the sink. She stood uncomfortably close, Ardern recalls in her new memoir, “A Different Kind of Power”—“so close I could feel her heat against my cheek.” “I just wanted to say thank you,” the woman told her, with what Ardern describes as a “seething, non-specific rage.” “Thank you for ruining the country.” Outside New Zealand, Ardern is regarded very differently, as a liberal paragon among world leaders... it was the pandemic that crystallized an image of Ardern’s New Zealand as a quasi-fantastical place—the land that toxic populism forgot... Soon after Ardern left office, her party sustained an election loss described as a “bloodbath.” New Zealand is now led by a conservative coalition whose first Deputy Prime Minister, Winston Peters, secured his position by appealing to anti-vaxxers and has compared Ardern’s government with Nazi Germany’s. Ardern herself has spent the past two years living in the United States, having become so polarizing that she has virtually vanished from public life in her home country. The tale of what it was like for Ardern to go from being adored to being reviled so quickly would have made for an unmissable book. That’s not the story she wanted to tell... The book doesn’t come close to explaining her country’s confounding transformation during the two years it was sealed off from the outside world, suspended in an increasingly claustrophobic COVID bubble... New Zealand’s size and isolation have long been the source of great pride and great insecurity. It’s a well-worn joke that Kiwis will seize the flimsiest chance to proclaim themselves “best in the world, per capita” at pretty much anything, perpetually thirsty for outsiders to notice that their tiny nation punches above its weight. After the lockdown ended, the country was jubilant. Perhaps, some mused, the same collaborative spirit could be harnessed to tackle other intractable problems, like a severe housing crisis and corrosive inequality. Others embraced the opportunity to explore their own country while it was emptied of international tourists. And then the mood began to curdle. The government obtained vaccines later than many other countries, largely owing to its COVID-free status. In early 2021, Kiwis enviously eyed images of vaccinated Americans and Europeans taking spring vacations in far-flung locales. Their own rollout wasn’t due to start for the general public until July. And since the government had never managed to meaningfully increase I.C.U. capacity, lockdowns remained the sole weapon against new outbreaks. When COVID escaped the quarantine system in August, 2020, and in February, 2021, brief lockdowns proved just as effective as the first. That changed with the more infectious Delta variant. After a single case was discovered in August, 2021, New Zealand went back into lockdown. For most of the country, it lasted three weeks. But in the largest city, Auckland, the lockdown dragged on for a hundred and seven days. By then, New Zealand had been cut off from the outside world for more than a year. The quarantine system had become increasingly overloaded, with thousands separated from spouses or children or unable to visit dying relatives. The country’s pandemic response no longer appeared to be world-leading. An upside-down narrative emerged, in which New Zealanders were trapped in a mode of draconian deprivation while all sensible nations had opened up and moved on... To speed up vaccinations, the government had imposed mandates covering forty per cent of workers. In December, 2021, the Auckland lockdown was lifted, and the country moved to a system that required digital vaccine passes to enter most indoor public places. Three-quarters of the population supported the mandates, according to polls, but they became more contentious when the unvaccinated found themselves unable to dine out with friends or get a haircut; several thousand lost their jobs because they refused to get vaccinated... On February 8, 2022, a convoy of vehicles descended on Wellington, inspired by the Canadian trucker protest that was then paralyzing Ottawa... The protesters represented a small portion of the population, but the discontent was mainstream. New Zealand, already an expensive place to live, was hit hard by rising inflation, the result of COVID spending and global events like the war in Ukraine. National, the country’s main conservative party, was able to tie the punishing cost of living into a larger narrative: that the border closure, lockdowns, and pandemic assistance had tanked the economy. A smaller populist party, New Zealand First, increased its following by courting vaccine skeptics. By January, 2023, Ardern’s net approval rating would fall to fifteen points, from an extraordinary peak of seventy-six in May, 2020... Ardern does not mention any of this. She leaves it to others to theorize about why the country turned on her, simply expressing a regretful wish for “a world where we saved lives and we brought everyone with us.”... It’s a strange irony that the result of New Zealand’s unique pandemic experience is a country beset by the same problems as those facing most other modern democracies: polarization, disinformation, declining trust in government."
This doesn't stop covid hystericists continuing to insist that Australia and New Zealand got things right during covid. Of course, the author needs to blame the Russians for the consequences of New Zealand's politicisation of covid (which curiously are similar worldwide).
